Posts tagged earth

Talk about plucking a needle from a cosmic haystack. NASA just announced that its planet-hunting Kepler telescope has discovered Kepler 452b, an exoplanet that exists inside the habitable zone around a G-type star (that is, a star that's awfully similar to our own sun). The planet is about 60 perc...

What's does Earth look like from a million miles away? Well, NASA provided the masses with a glimpse today, thanks to the first photo snapped from the Deep Space Climate Observatory Satellite (DSCOVR) launched by SpaceX's Falcon 9 in February. More specifically, the image is constructed from three...

Can you believe that Google Earth has been around for a full decade now? To celebrate this milestone, Google unveiled a pair of striking new (and expanded) features to the planet virtualization system on Monday. The first is Voyager, which available on the desktop edition. It's designed to help yo...

It's no longer a challenge to get astonishingly sharp photos of the Earth from space, but video? That's another matter. UrtheCast is about to open the floodgates, however. It just released the first batch of full-color, high-definition video of Earth recorded from the International Space Statio...

What's going to happen when astronauts finally land on Mars? In all likelihood, the expedition will be a joint effort between multiple nations and space agencies. So when a perilous explorer steps out onto the red planet, we might need a new flag. One that represents Earth. Such a mission is unlik...

You might think of gravity as an invisible force here on Earth, but that's not entirely true... if you have the right computer simulation, that is. Researchers at the National Center for Atmospheric Research have developed a climate model that shows the gravity waves in the upper atmosphere, where...

An out-of-control Russian spacecraft has finally met its demise after re-entering the Earth's atmosphere. Progress M-27M was supposed to perform a resupply mission with the ISS, but ground control quickly lost contact after its launch on April 28th. Since then, the craft has been orbiting and slow...

The US government has been willing to loosen its grip on satellite data, but what about the info from other countries? Don't worry, that's opening up as well. Russia has declared that the Earth-sensing data it collects from civilian satellites is now available to the public, not just the governmen...

It's easy to talk about carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions and their effect on our planet, but visualizing them? That's hard. Thankfully, NASA has stepped up to the plate with a computer model that shows how CO2 travels across Earth's atmosphere in the space of a year. As you'll see in the clip below,...

Being hip to PR is certainly part of the job description for NASA astronauts, but some are especially social media-savvy. Take fresh ISS resident Gregory "Reid" Wiseman: the man knows he's in a privileged position to take photos and videos, and holy crap has he shared. Via Twitter, Reid has provid...

Earth will get a very not-too-close closeup today from NASA's Cassini spacecraft, now on the far side of the planet Saturn. The photo session will take place between 2:27 PM and 2:42 PM PDT. The Earth will be seen from 900 million miles away. It won't be a detailed image, but it is the longest-ran...